Beach Day and Route 66 begins (Mon. July 19)

Finally, what most people go to California for!! A day in the sun. Too bad it was a day in the clouds for most of it! But, hey, cuts down on the sunburn just a bit. We made it through with almost no sunburn at all. Not bad when three of the four have Irish skin.

We started out at Huntington Beach known as the best surfing beach in CA. The waves were absolutely amazing! Being a week day it was a bit quite but that was good as there was zero traffic getting to the beach and we got to park right at the main parking lot by the beach. It was nice to just take a couple of hours to sit down, read a magazine and relax.

We spent four hours at the beach and then got in the touring mode again. Our next stop was Long Beach where the Queen Mary is permanently docked and is now used as a hotel and restaurant. I had debated booking a night on the ship when I was making our plans for this trip but was afraid about getting sea sick on the boat. So we had to be happy with just seeing it from the outside. The Queen Mary was used for the Poseidon Adventure and I believe the Titanic also so I definitely recognized it, the boys did too.

From Long Beach we headed to the Santa Monica pier. This is the unofficial end of Route 66 (which was to be our unofficial start). We spent quite a bit of time on the pier checking out all of the shops. We met a guy running a Route 66 kiosk who gave us advice to skip to Oatman, AZ before staring our 66 trip as he thinks everything is boring from Santa Monica to there. We decided we are going to ignore him as we believe there are some good things to be seen in CA. He did at least give us some helpful information by telling us where the actual end of 66 is located.

From the pier we headed over to the Third Street Promenade. The Promenade has street entertainers, shops and restaurants. It is only a few streets from the pier. We found a fun place to eat called Barney's Beanery, an original, old Route 66 restaurant (not actually on the route but close enough for the travelers). It had one of those menus that are not good for someone like me. I am best if you give me a handful of choices so that I can maybe make up my mind in a reasonable amount of time. This menu had 1,000 items on it. I must have changed my mind what I wanted 1,000 times!!! In the end Conor did the hot wings (no surprise to those who know him well), Colin a bacon burger (ditto what I said for Conor), Pedro a calzone and I had Mexican. So you can see that menu was really diverse. The food was so so but the atmosphere!!! A really fun place. The menu had many little stories about the history so we had to take one with us. One story is that the chili was so popular that customers would come to get some when they had no money. The owner would have them leave the license plate off their car as collateral until they came back to pay. Any license plate not collected were hung on the walls and ceilings. There are hundreds of them hanging there still to this day!!! Ask us to show you the menu when we come back.

After eating we jumped into the car and drove over to the real official end of Route 66. We planned to follow it east as close to our campground as we could and then we would pick up from there in the morning. We were very disappointed that while the pier had an "end of Route 66" sign the actual, official end did not. We also were not impressed with the signs leading us along the old Route. They were practically non existent. I really expected there would be something to follow. I hope the rest of the route doesn't leave you hanging like this. We managed to follow along using a map through a good part of the Hollywood, Beverly Hills, LA section but finally found ourselves on a road that was not part of the Route. By now it was really late and we decided that with all the touring we had done in the LA area the night before that we had probably seen most of it anyway so we hopped on the 10 and headed back to the campground.